Continuity Planning 101

The United Telecom Council (UTC) is a global trade association of companies that own, manage, or provide critical telecommunications systems to better support their core business. These companies include electric, gas, and water utilities; natural gas pipelines; critical infrastructure companies; and other industry stakeholders. Due to the nature of their environment during disaster situations, these utilities generally operate their own private communications systems, since past experience has proved that commercial telecommunications networks may have high rates of failure.

The storms of the 2005 hurricane season � specifically Katrina, Rita, and Wilma � severely impacted the entire telecommunications industry in Florida and the Gulf Coast. One aspect of the experience is that the radio, fiber, and microwave internal networks of the electric, gas, and water utilities functioned quite well throughout the storm and immediately thereafter. The commercial wireless, landline telephone and other telecommunications networks did not fare nearly as well. Even the UTC companies that experienced damage generally maintained communications via redundancy and most were fully back on line within 24�48 hours. Many of the commercial communications networks were still recovering months later. Perhaps the UTC can provide all of us with some guidance on how to better prepare for disaster and what better advisor than William R. Moroney, President and Chief Executive Officer of the UTC.

Rich Tehrani (RT): I believe the UTC ran a formal survey to determine just how well the industry performed and to assess why its performance as compared to its commercial counterparts was so dramatically diverse.

William R. Moroney (WRM): Yes, and the data provided some very interesting facts. For example, 86 percent of the responding companies reported that their communications networks not only survived, but continued to operate well throughout the restoration efforts. In particular, the crews from the many responding companies provided critical communications using land mobile radio (LMR) networks.

RT: How is it that the UTC companies so clearly outperform the commercial operators?

WRM: The quick is answer is we build them to survive disaster so that we can use them to restore critical services. However, in fairness to the commercial operators, the critical infrastructure industries (CII) have a much narrower focus. The redundancies and robustness built into the CII systems are limited in size and scope since they are designed and constructed to meet specialized needs. Similar construction might be cost-prohibitive for a commercial system. However, the performance of the CII networks proved the fact that communications systems can withstand the flooding and intense winds of a hurricane if they are built extremely well.